


Reservations.

by quondam



Category: Mass Effect
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-11-06
Updated: 2012-11-06
Packaged: 2017-11-18 02:12:46
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,838
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/555745
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/quondam/pseuds/quondam
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>When a game of strip poker leaves Shepard a little shy and self-conscious about a particular part of her body, Kaidan gives her the boost she needs.</p><p>Previously titled something else on the masseffectkink meme on LJ, but for the life of me I can't remember.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Reservations.

The crew’s enjoying a particularly bland evening. Bland in the sense that there aren’t firearms to repair and Cerberus agents trying to rip out their guts and certainly not favors to fill for the bickering, childish, leaders of each of their races. But also, decidedly not bland in the sense that most of the crew members tucked away in one of the shipboard lounges are absolutely, completely, unquestionably, three sheets to the wind.

Shepard’s the loudest with a particularly loose laugh, letting her hair down both literally and figuratively for the evening. Gone is the grueling commander weighed down with the lives of everyone in the universe, and hello is that girl she used to be back in basic training (for a little while, at least). She raises her cup above her head and as far back as her unsteady arm stretches behind her chair, and EDI’s there, refilling the glassware with some unsavory brew of non-Earth origin. She takes a sip, mostly getting the frothy head and none of the actual liquid, and she’s barely even swallowed it down before her eyes shift to Kaidan at her left.

“Don’t even start!” Her voice drawls, sloppy and teasing. Her free hand gestures in the air without direction. “Not as good as Vancouver or Seattle or wherever you get that snobby microbrew you love so much. Be happy it’s digestible.” 

Since the Reapers, mentions of Earth are usually met with blank faces and widened eyes, each and every human—even the ones not Earthborn—suffering a reminder of what the people of their home planet are enduring. Tonight, though, Kaidan doesn’t think about the death and destruction, just the way there’s a glistening of beer on her lips, the way the ends of her hair brush just past her shoulders—God, he thinks, this is the longest he’s ever seen it—and how little she’s wearing after a few particularly bad hands at Strip Poker (although he’d argue her drinking is the cause for it more than anything).

“Did I say anything?” He says with a smug smile, the kind she usually mentions wanting to smack off his face with a bit of a lilt to her voice. As if to demonstrate his point, he takes his own barely touched glass of beer, the same cup that’s now warm for how long it’s sat untouched, and does his best to summon some skill learned fifteen years ago as he chugs down nearly half of the liquid.

The corner of her mouth quirks in response, and her attention’s only pulled away when Vega is nudging her on the other side.

“Put your cards up, Lola,” he says with too much enthusiasm, a giveaway for the hand he’s got.

She nudges him right back with her elbow, perhaps a little stronger than he had, but friendly nonetheless. Picking up her cards, she sorts through them with a hazy head and eventually lays them out along with James and Liara, the only other players left in that particular round. James takes the pot.

“Shirts!” He says to the table, intent on collecting his winnings.

“Why are you looking at me?” Shepard says as she starts pulling at her top—her shoes, socks, pants, and jacket lost in prior rounds when she’d stayed in far too long for the cards she held—and she again gestures her hands, this time towards Liara. Shepard is left sitting in her bra and briefs. “Liara’s got way bigger tits than I do. Supple, too. Asari skin, you know what they say…”

Liara gives her a look as she strips down her outermost layer, reveals a tank-top beneath. “No, what do they say, Shepard?”

She pauses, brow wrinkling and lips pursed as if trying to remember what she was getting at in the first place. Instead, she deflects in outrage. “That’s fucking cheating, T’Soni! I could’ve put on my whole damn wardrobe too. Maybe even my hardsuit. See how happy you would’ve been with me taking off gloves instead of my pants.”

The rest of the table hoots and hollers, and Liara begrudgingly gives in, pulls the fabric free until she’s just as bare as Shepard from the waist up, the bra the only thing that remains. “No ogling.”

Vega lifts his head animatedly. “That’s not even fair. To the victor, the spoils,” he says.

Kaidan laughs beside Shepard, and she turns her attention on him. “You’ve got too much on. And you know why?” She pulls at his t-shirt, plucks the fabric and releases it. “Because you never go all in, that’s why. You back out before your skin’s on the line.”

“No one cares since my breasts aren’t as nice as Liara’s,” he says with humor in his voice, and the woman in question tosses some morsel of food across the table at him in response.

Shepard considers it, palms her own breasts through the small bra, as if debating her thoughts. “You’d think I could have gotten some cybernetic boob job, right? I mean, Cerberus spent four billion credits on me and they didn’t even give me an upgrade?”

“Shepard,” Liara says in a serious, drunken tone. She reaches her arm across Vega, touches Shepard’s wrist as she still presses her hands to her chest. “I think yours are quite nice. Understated.”

“That’s kind of you to say,” Shepard says matter of factly and with a similar faux seriousness.

Vega’s eyes linger on just how closely that blue hand is to Shepard’s chest, raises a brow. “I’d say I’d judge for you personally, Lola,” his head lifts and jerks in the direction of Kaidan, “but the Major would have my cojones for even considering it.”

Shepard lets her hands fall, and smacks her palm into Vega’s shoulder. “You’re not supposed to know about that,” she replies, as if somehow drawing more attention to it will put the nature of her relationship with Major Alenko back under the veil she thought it was hidden under.

Kaidan takes a choking sip of his beer, cheeks pink.

“No offense, Commander,” Vega goes on, “but if you think anyone didn’t know about it…”

“Really, Shepard,” Liara chimes in, “I think at this point the only person who doesn’t know is Joker, and that’s because it’s going to be so funny when he finds out everyone else but him knew about it for weeks.”

“Fuck you guys,” Shepard grunts and pushes herself from the table in a sign of aggravation and aggression, both drummed up for dramatic effect rather than a sincerity on her emotions. “Did you know they knew, Kaidan?”

“Of course not, ma’am,” he lies, and his face gives him away.

“I’ll have you all airlocked for…for… insubordination!” She says as she stands, the corners of her mouth lifting into a smile she’s trying to hold back because of the absurdity of it all. The sober version of herself, she knows, will be so very angry at herself tomorrow. “You too, Kaidan,” she continues on as she gathers her previously removed garments in her hands, only pulls on her jacket but doesn’t button it shut. Oh, sober Shepard will be so very, very pissed in the morning. “You can stay here with Liara’s tits. Me and mine are going to bed.” 

Shepard goes to leave, makes it halfway to the door, and returns, this time taking her full beer glass with her.

“Welcome to the dog house,” Vega speaks to Kaidain with a grin, gathering up the deck of cards and slipping them back into their case with something of an inebriated struggle.

“I better go,” he says as an excuse, the most sober one of them all—a fact that not only ties in to the extreme distaste he has for what they’ve been forcing down but just how badly an excess of alcohol reacts with his L2 implants. “Last time she drank, she tried to get her arm in the fish tank to see if the jellyfish actually stung.”

And with that, Kaidan follows her out, a few minutes behind.  
  
—  
  
When Kaidan reaches her quarters, Shepard’s clothes are abandoned in a heap on her chair, one of her shoes on its side on the floor beside that particular piece of furniture. The fish tank, he notes, is untouched, and thank god for that. Last time, he’d spent ten minutes fighting with her about the species of creatures she had in that tank, another twenty pulling up information on the extranet to prove his point to her, and the rest of the hour soaking up all the salt water she’d spilled across the floor in her struggle for undersea exploration.

“Go sleep in the crew quarters,” Shepard mumbles from the bathroom where she’s haphazardly rinsing her face. Lukewarm water, Kaidan knows, because she can never stand to wait long enough for the damn tap to get hot enough.

He puts on a smile and leans in the open doorway as he watches her, noting how she’s back down to her undergarments. Her words may say one thing, but he knows her well enough, knows the tone she uses to know how serious she isn’t.

“Did Liara’s girls turn you down?” Shepard asks and brushes her teeth, rinsing out her mouth with handfuls of water.

“We know I prefer yours,” his voice is low when he talks.

“Ha-ha,” she mocks, and slides past him, but not before running a wet hand particularly high on his groin in a teasing fashion. He groans, and that puts a smile on her face, even as she keeps her back to him, heading for her bed.

The sheets are already a mess, neither of them having found the energy earlier that morning to fold down the blankets, corners crisp, just like their days in boot camp. Shepard crawls in underneath and when Kaidan doesn’t immediately follow, she rolls over impatiently, looking towards his side of the bed. “Just get in bed already!” 

There’s a routine Kaidan has when he goes to sleep, a new one he’s even developed for the nights he’s spent in her quarters, however few and far between they’ve been. He rushes through them tonight, however, flicking each light off as he makes his way to the bed. At the edge of it, he strips down to his underwear, foregoing the step of folding each soiled garment—he’d never forget how much Shepard had teased him for folding dirty laundry, of all things—to join her a second faster.

He crawls under the sheets, expecting to feel the slide of her arm across his chest as she pulls herself in close and ready for sleep, but Shepard has other ideas. Her palm, instead, snakes down his abdomen, over the hard planes of muscle he maintains even at his age, and into the waistband of his briefs. There’s no preamble, no hesitation with her, not like their first time together. She knows him now, just as he knows her, and Shepard takes what she wants. Always.

There’s lips at his collarbone, warm and wet, while her hand works simultaneously, gripping his soft cock and trying to ease it awake. Kaidan lets out a moan as he feels the rush of blood to that specific spot of his body, cock growing stiff and engorged as she proceeds.

“Thought I was in trouble,” he says, turning his head to kiss at her hair while she continues to kiss high on chest and shoulder.

“Uh-uh,” she replies, licking a path down to a nipple, her warm tongue passing over it.

One of Kaidan’s hand likewise slips down her stomach and into her underwear, strokes over the familiar thatch of hair and the sopping moistness of her slit. Her hips press into his fingers, and though for a moment they’re both content to lie there, lazy and tired as they stroke eachother off… Kaidan has no intention of cumming in her hand. He withdraws his digits from her, and instead uses them to push her briefs down, and Shepard does her best, struggling as she squirms, kicking legs as she works the fabric down the rest of the way. He returns the favor, and helps her with his undergarments, lifting his hips to help lower them on down.

Shepard doesn’t wait long after that to climb astride him, the wet core of her pressing against his abdomen, feeling his stiffened cock rubbing against her rear from behind. The room’s dark, but the light of the fish tank’s enough for them to still see one another with clarity, and Kaidan, though lying down, reaches his hands up to try to fight with her bra.

“No,” she brushes his hands away, even as one of the straps slides off her shoulder.

His brows furrow in confusion, so he tries a different tactic, lets his palms rub her breasts over the cups of the bra. Shepard moans appreciatively as he squeezes, but when he goes to slip his fingers between the fabric and her skin, she once again diverts his physical attention.

“No,” she repeats, hand stretching behind her to stroke him as she grinds herself against his stomach for a second.

“Why not?”

“They’re not…” Her head shakes, and Shepard looks like she’s about to continue on, but she clamps her mouth down shut. Instead, she rises on her knees and shifts her body until she’s above his erection. Holding it steady, she guides it into her, settles down on him as far as she can go, as far as her body will allow. She moans without restraint, grips the skin at his hips in response, and begins to ride him.

Words of protest on the subject are lost as soon as their bodies begin rocking together. She’s played him, and played him well, in that regard. Shepard bends her body forward, leans in to kiss him as he lifts his hips against hers, bodies slapping together as he slides in and out of her.

The closer she gets, the less she can focus on his mouth, however, and with her hands bracing her on the half wall behind her bed, she lifts her head from him, eyes clenched tightly shut as she is reduced down to a bunch of guttural, animalistic cries. Kaidan takes the time to kiss her neck, her chest, the swell of her breasts not hidden by the fabric of her bra. She’s lost in the moment though, and he feels her clench around him, feels the way her body tenses in orgasm, and his mouth dips down, pushes the bra as well, and lets his mouth encase a nipple, sucking tenderly. Shepard doesn’t respond as she’d previously done, though, instead he feels one hand at the back of his head, encouraging the sucking he’s doing. 

He comes not a few seconds later, and both of them still afterwards, her body, sticky and sweaty, collapsed to his chest. Shepard slides off of him eventually, despite how reluctant she always is to no longer have him inside of her. She rolls sleepily on her side and Kaidan assumes his usual position, his chest to her back, arm around her. They stay like that until morning.  
  
—  
  
At Oh-five-thirty, the lights in Shepard’s quarters come on as part of her wake up protocol. Immediately, Shepard rouses at the disturbance, hand rising to cover her eyes, though it’s Kaidan’s grumbling behind her that is actually more of her alarm than anything else lately.

“You’re the Commander,” he whispers against her neck, “let’s sleep in.”

She gives her response, a decidedly positive hum of agreement, but it’s Kaidan who starts moving again, pulling away from her, the mattress unsettled as his weight shifts. He heads to the bathroom, turns the shower on, and Shepard listens to him start his day, while thoroughly avoiding hers. When he comes back, he’s got a towel slung around his hips, holding the ends together at his side. He shares a smile with her where she lies, face half buried into one of her pillows.

“You drank a lot last night, feel like shit?”

“Not even close,” she replies, although there’s a definite ache. It’s just that a night of drinking doesn’t compare to being dead or nearly blown up or a gunshot wound or… any number of things that have happened in the last few years, months, or weeks, even. Through tired eyes, she watches him dress, pulling out the spare fresh changes of uniform he’s begun keeping amidst her things. 

Somewhere around him pulling on a clean pair of underwear, Shepard summons the strength to sit up, at least. Her brow furrows as she finds her bra still on, twisted at odd angles and the straps limply hanging down her arms. She quickly fixes it at once.

“What was with you last night?” 

She turns sharply to look at him. “What?”

Holding his undershirt in his hands, he motions towards her. “Wouldn’t let me take it off, hardly let me even touch—”

“It’s nothing,” she responds quickly, and fishes for last night’s underwear, pulling it on temporarily until she reaches the shower. Suddenly, the feeling of bareness in front of him is unsettling.

“Shepard…” Kaidan’s voice is gentle, and when she moves to pass him, he grabs her by the arm, stops her in her tracks. “What’s the deal?”

There’s a glare from her, a serious one this time, unlike the ones she’d thrown his way the night before. “Nothing.”

He doesn’t believe her, not for a second, but he lets her go just the same, watching her mostly undressed form saunter on over to her bathroom. Unlike him, she shuts the door behind her.

Kaidan’s mostly dressed by time she comes out, hair soaked and towel around her. He looks to her, and he doesn’t miss the way she avoids him all together. He pulls on his socks, and Shepard goes out of her way to give him her back as she pulls on clean undergarments. It’s such a strange and new behavior… it’s unnerving.

“I dont understand,” he says flat out, scrubbing a hand over his face. “What did I miss, Shepard?”

She grits her teeth, body tense. She hated her drunk self something fierce. That girl always started trouble the sober version of her had to fix. “Kaidan—it’s—”

“Did I do something? Because if I did, I swear to God, I didn’t know—”

“Jesus, Kaidan. Not everything’s about you. This is just me, it’s my thing. Let me have it.”

Her words make him pause, and he drums a pair of fingers over his lower lip in concentration, unwilling to let it go. “You’re not telling me that you think there’s something wrong with your—” He’s practically a middle aged man, and he still fumbles over certain words. “—Breasts, are you?”

Shepard huffs and doesn’t reply, instead reaches for a shirt.

“Hey, no, no,” he moves to stop her, and slips his body between her and her drawer. “You’ve got to be kidding.” Kaidan nearly laughs, and it only further sours the look on her face. “I mean… you’ve personally killed a Reaper, defended the universe, cured the damn genophage, and you’ve got hang ups on how your—they—look?”

“Believe it or not,” her words are angry, defensive, “I’m a woman underneath the dirt and armor and bureaucratic bullshit. Sorry to disappoint your fantasy that I’m just built of steel and bitch, Kaidan.”

“Shepard—” he sets his hands on her upper arms, stilling her where she stands, hoping it will calm some of the tension out of her. “I’m not saying that. That’s beside the point anyway. I mean… listen. They’re beautiful. Gorgeous, even. Do you know how many dreams I’ve had personally starring—” one hand lifts, gesturing to her covered breasts “ _them_?”

“This is really not a conversation I want to be having—”

“No, no,” he stands firm in posture and voice, “I want to hear what crazy ideas you’ve cooked up.”

She stares him down, head spinning as she weighs the options of getting out of this argument. She could get out of it, and very easily, being the Commander and all. But would he ever let it go? Unlikely. And having someone in her bed to scratch that particular itch for her lately… well her hands just didn’t have the spontaneity he did. There is, of course, the lingering sentiment that she knows he’s being genuine. Supportive and caring, even.

Kaidan senses her debating of the options—a process at which she wasn’t as quick at compared to say, EDI, although she was always quick thinking on her feet—and opts to cut her off before she’s made her choice. Instead, he backs her up the foot to the side of the bed, and forces her to sit down on the edge of it before she can protest. “Just give me five minutes, Shepard. Five.” He pleads.

Shepard glances up to him, a lack of patience on her features. “I’ve got to walk the ship, finish a report from last night, meet with Hackett on the vid-comm. You’ve got to eat breakfast so you’re still useful to this ship later in the day.”

She’s erecting the walls between them now, each excuse another layer of bricks to keep them apart. It’s a process that, by now, Kaidan is awfully familiar with. Likewise, he’s equally as schooled in the most efficient way of knocking down the brick and mortar before it’s even begun to dry.

It starts with his hand on her cheek, palm sliding along the harsh cut of her jawbone, thumb smoothing over her cheek and the soft, slightly discolored skin right beneath her eye. “I think I’m in love with them more than I’m even in love with you,” he says with a teasing smile.

It has the effect of disarming her, the way humor so often can to anyone. More than that, it distracts her, and gives him the advantage he’s been looking for. Shepard cheekily responds. “That’s not surprising.”

“Mm, I’m serious,” Kaidan goes on, his voice a fraction lower than his normal speaking tone, the type of voice he uses only on her, and only when his mind isn’t on the mission or the fate of the world. He lowers himself to his knees between her own parted legs, his hands stroking over her bare thighs that are still ever so slightly damp and heated from her shower. Fingers stray dangerously close to the line of her underwear, but never over the fabric. Meanwhile, he leans in, kisses the sharpness of her collarbone, drags his lips down to the valley between her small breasts. “Fuck Vancouver,” he says into her skin, kisses the slight swell of her breast above the cup of her bra while he looks up to her and meets her eyes, “this is my home.”

Shepard’s grinning like a love sick idiot afterward.

“Maybe I haven’t done my job,” he protests against himself, lets his hands trace up the sides of her abdomen to her arms, fingers hooking on each tightly strained bra strap as he drags them down. “If for a minute you think you don’t have the most perfect breasts in the entire universe, then I’ve done something wrong.” While one hand kneads a covered breast, the other reaches behind her and draws on a skill he honed as a younger man, forcing the two ends of the clasps together until there’s enough give for each of them to release. His mouth to her skin, Kaidan feels the nervous catch of her breath.

“You’re out of your mind,” Shepard says like she’s about to put him back in his place and bolt, but what’s more telling is how she doesn’t. She sits, obedient and enjoying where things are headed.

“Probably. Eventually.” He shrugs a shoulder, “blame the biotics for that.” As he talks he works, and only now does he finally pull that tricky underwire bra—designed for form and function rather than appearances—off entirely, and casts it aside. “What bad things could you have to say about them?” Kaidan inquires, genuinely curious.

Her eyes roll and head shakes, finally on the cusp of backing away from where they’ve headed with this entire charade. “There’s a scar,” she confesses, drawing her hand over her left breast. A finger tip is drawn along a thin, silvery scar that just barely bites into the pink of her areola.

Kaidan’s head shakes in response and he pushes her hand aside, his mouth latching on to her already hard nipple for a second, before his lips specifically seek out the line in question. “That scar and I are old buddies,” he insists. His brow furrows afterward and he looks up to her for his own confession. “I remembered seeing it the night before Ilos, wondering where you got it, if you’d ever tell me. And after Cerberus…” Kaidan’s eyes shut for just a second, deep in thought as the pain of her death consumes him again. They open, and his attention is hers once more. “I saw you on Horizon, like nothing had ever happened. Put back together. And all I could think about later was if they got rid of that scar, too.”

Shepard strokes his cheek in response, trying to blink away the extra wetness suddenly coating her eyes. Whenever he talks about things like this—about her death, the years that followed, even the more alarming and only once mentioned idea that for awhile he’d been prepared to take his own life after he’d lost her—it’s hard for Shepard to keep her composure. Her one weakness, as far as she’s concerned.

“You don’t know what I felt when I saw it again weeks ago, Shepard.”

She chews at her lower lip, watching him carefully after his words are out in the open. “I suppose you like the freckles, too, then.”

His face, only a second ago reading of the complicated emotions of grief and loss and utter joy at the same time, now illuminates with her new words. “I love ‘em,” Kaidan argues, and lets his fingers run along the dots of color across the skin of her breasts, a pattern that appears over most of her, her shoulders especially.

“And you wouldn’t gladly trade them for some buxom blue ones? A little perkier, fuller?” When she speaks, her words are lighter, a little less serious.

“You know me, I wouldn’t know what to do with that much of _anything_.”

For the first time since the night before, Shepard laughs. Her arms are slung around his neck, and leaning forward, she initiates the kiss this time, her mouth pressing rough and hard against his. Kaidan pulls her in close, pulling her from the bed and on to his thighs as he continues to kneel, their bodies pressed in against one another’s.

“Requesting the morning off, Commander,” he says against the corner of her mouth, working a line of kisses down her throat.

“Do you feel bad sometimes, Kaidan?” Shepard ignores his words for her own, questioning him even as his mouth again temporarily captures one of her nipples, eager to show his appreciation.

“For what?”

“People are dead. They’re dying. Everywhere. Millions, billions of them.” A hand pushes through his short hair, just the slightest amount of pressure on the back of his skull as he laves the hardened pebble of her nipple intermittently. “And I’m here… having a moment of self doubt over my fucking breasts, of all things. Wasting my morning because I can’t imagine telling you to make your mouth stop doing what it’s doing. I should be doing more out there. Not even sleeping, so long as I can save a few more people.” Her words are breathy the longer she continues, the twinge of arousal between her thighs as he works incessantly at her sensitive breast.

Though there’s nothing in the entire damn universe he’d rather be doing than exactly what he already is, Kaidan stops, pulls away, and lifts his head until they’re eye to eye. “You’re human, Shepard. Not a machine. If you push yourself any harder, you’ll break, and you won’t be any good to anyone. We’re losing more people than we can imagine, but if we lose you now… no one will have a chance in the end.” Dark eyes look away from hers for a moment, and they’re softer, sadder, when they meet hers again. “Without you, this mission falls apart. And if something happens, if we don’t actually make it out of this, Shepard… I need our last few weeks and days to have been spent like this. I need to know they were with you.”

She doesn’t have the words to reply, a rarity for her. Instead, she just continues to stroke his scalp in silence.

“Let me have this. Let _us_ have this,” Kaidan pleads.

She nods, leaning in to touch her lips to his forehead. When she speaks, she’s hardly louder than a whisper. “Okay.”  
  
  



End file.
